moshezadka

Just as an aside, there is a word for "specifically male man", it's "wereman" (just as "wifman", the old version of "woman" meant "specifically female man" -- "man" was short for "human", from "humanous" -- earthling, which both women and men are, despite martian/venutian assertions to the contrary...)

I learn all my etymology from Dinosaur Comics, http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=551 :)

For the record, 18yo me would be interested in it. :)

Wow, just wow.

I never studied in college in the US, and I'm horrified that this is the standard. In Israel, we had the previous tests in the library, and the student union created a (for-sale) curated versions, all above board and perfectly condoned. The assumption was that memorizing the entire test-bank, containing hundreds of questions, was harder than actually understanding the material -- but that if you thought that was your best way to pass the test, go ahead and do that.

In fact, some professors explicitly encouraged memorizing proofs for all important theorems by promising that the test will contain at least one or two of them. Of course, usually they followed this by explaining that you're free to come up with your own proof, or memorize key points and manage to interpolate. I would recite proofs in the shower, to myself, every morning.

It would only be cheating if you got the actual test being used ahead of time (or, of course, consulted a confederate or disallowed materials during the test). It would not be cheating, and in fact, tolerated explicitly, to harass the professor by asking questions from test banks that you failed to solve, and getting valuable information that way ("it's not going to be on the exam, don't worry about it").

The professors assumed that anyone who puts that much energy into studying for the test deserved the grades they got.

tl;dr: In Israel, only stealing the tests or breaking rules during test periods was frowned upon: anything else was viewed as "studying really hard."

How will the "properly-applied" eugenics be done? I mean, currently people get other people to write their papers for a college degree -- think of how much they'd be willing to pay if it was their kids' existence on the line!

tl;dr: Eugenics won't be properly applied because pre-eugenics people will game the system.

Yes, you are missing one thing: if you are storing that file, a security breach (several kinds of those) means an attacker can get that file. Are you thinking this is not a problem? Think again!

* For "moderately" strong passwords (say, ones which need 10,000 attempts to get), getting at your encrypted files means the difference between you being able to throttle-and-disable a serial guesser and having the password hacked (bonus points if that was the password your user uses on other sites with the same usernames.) * An attacker can go over the file to find "extremely" easy password for some user. * A determined attacker can test hundreds of millions of passwords for a specific user, and know when he succeeded, before you ever notice it. So unless your website has a "change password every year" policy, the attacker can breach even "moderately strong" passwords.

This is even before issues like "well proven encryption libraries" are still broken, and if the one you used is broken, your file is still out there.

This doesn't mean that it cannot be done, with enough care -- but it does mean that if you avoid doing it, it's a big relief, and a big potential crisis averted.

Maaaan.

This says absolutely nothing, except for the ever-present "just start-up, it doesn't matter." It doesn't matter only if you're a Blub programmer (see http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html though I imagine most people have already seen it), or if you're a non-technical manager needing to convince himself that it doesn't matter.

So here is some real advice: if you are doing a typical "mostly-web-but-a-lot-of-little-elses" choose Python. Python has good frameworks like Django (that will bring up you to speed clearly for a CRUD-based web site) and Twisted (for the small "everything elses"). If you find performance bottlenecks, well, the C-API is not a "pleasure" to work with, but it's reasonable at least. It is easy to learn, so the whole "find an engineer familiar with it" is a bit of a red herring.

Sure, this advice will not fit all start-ups, but if you think it doesn't apply to yours, you better have fairly solid arguments.

(Some arguments that I think are solid: "We already know Ruby well, and the difference is small enough that this tips the scales", "we need to write in Davlik for Android". "But I know C++" isn't, for example.)

Well, the contradictory argument can be made as well: If you're a start-up, and your early adopters get annoyed because someone made sure Firesheep works with your web site, and they're all getting pranked, they're going to decide they won't bother.

OTOH, I am writing this comment on an open wireless router.

On the gripping hand, nothing I put here is private, and if someone "pranks" me, I can just login again and delete offensive content. Karma isn't actually money...

What do you mean "not for professional use"?

For most professional use, meaning "work", I use work's e-mail system (usually based on Exchange, but I guess that depends on where you work). If I apply to companies, do you think they really care what your address is?

I do some of the interviewing duties at work, and I can tell you my eyes pretty much skip over the e-mail part of the resume. HR needs it to e-mail them "your interview is on the 10/10 at 10:10am", but I doubt the HR person really cares about the address beyond copy'n'pasting it.

(Mind you, if I got work e-mail from a personal address, I would regard this as unprofessional behavior, but it doesn't matter if it's @gmail.com or @faceboook.com)

This is a variant on Schneier's fundamental theorem: Any fool can design a CAPTCHA for which they cannot program a solver. Just like in crypto, the only true test of CAPTCHAs are which one survive the test of time after having been attacked again and again, which is why it's very dangerous to jump on the bandwagon of a new CAPTCHA scheme (or worse yet -- design your own).

This is one reason why I'm partial to reCAPTCHA: there is a lot of experience in OCR systems, and we know what the current state of the art -- and we know what kind of things foil it.

Here is a sustainable approach: make sure that teachers are legally obligated to report bullying instances they are aware of to the police. (This law can be passed in the municipal, state or federal levels -- it doesn't matter.)

Bullying is assault. The first time the police gets involved, it will be unpleasant for the bully. The second time, he gets arrested. The next bully to come along might realize he doesn't want a criminal record, and if he doesn't, his parents might. And if they don't stop, they get sent away to juvie.

Why do we assume highschool/middleschool kids are somehow untouchable by the law?

But that's not the point, is it? We are talking about what advice parents give to their kids. The parents who would read a thread on HN are clearly the parents who care.

If a kid's parents do not care about him, I'd like to suggest that the least of that kid's problems is getting bullied in school.

Yes, here is a way to do it (not theoretical, worked in practice) -- get the adults involved. Make sure that your kid feels it's OK to tell you that he's been bullied (he's not being a snitch, he's bringing the problems to the knowledge of the right people). Then talk to the kid. Talk to the kid's parents. Make sure that if it doesn't stop, you will escalate -- you will talk to the school principal and the teachers. Make sure that the principal understand that you're willing to escalate further -- that you will make sure that it hits the local newspaper, that you will complain about it in the PTA meeting, and that you will be filing charges with the police for "assault".

When kids realize that there are consequences for bullying, and that they have to stop, they will. (The above goes for physical abuse, mostly. The solution for verbal abuse is "learn to insult them better". They either learn to stop insulting you, or they fall back to physical abuse, in which case, see above.)

That's what my parents did when I was bullied in middle school. They called the other kid's parents, and he stopped. There was one time they did need to threaten the principal with calling the police, and she pleaded with them not do it, promising that the kid was getting psychological help for his issues, and they agreed to conditionally back off (and he never threatened me again).

Bullying is already socially unacceptable -- it's against the law of society. We can solve it the same way we solve every other criminal activity, which is by involving the law enforcement authority.

Edit: Changed "socially acceptable" in the last paragraph to say "socially unacceptable" (was a typo).

I'm lucky...my mom had to recuse herself from the committee where they decided on whether to buy the software my company makes (for obvious reasons).

It can't work the way you explained it: I just solved your CAPTCHA with 33% success rate (waaay too high for a useful CAPTCHA). Perhaps if you ask for "the three pictures of X animal out of those 9", and you had a database with which animal has which property (and you also ran some fuzz over the images so no two images would ever be the same). I'm still skeptical...

I believe denial-of-service attacks, even against someone who you think is committing a criminal activity (remember: we are all innocent until proven guilty) is still illegal.

tl;dr: taking the law into your own hands is illegal, yes.

Nothing against scala, but you can program in Python and get all the goodness of JVM compat by simply running your programs in Jython...

I'm not even sure what he's suggesting. It's easy to say "let's ban political parties", but what would be the actual law? That people aren't allowed to call themselves Democrats (or Republicans?)? That people aren't allowed to say "I identify with the ideals espoused by X?"

Parties are an emergent phenomenon in almost all democratic systems, because politicians work in groups -- the same as anyone else, by the way. If Scott Adams suggested a specific legal system (for example, banning pooling campaign funds) I could find the flaw in that, but he cleverly gives no details, and so makes it impossible for people to find flaws in his (non-existent) system.

When I read this, I could not stop thinking about Harry Potter & The Methods of Rationality, and how HP calls out Dumbledore out for "pretending to be wise".

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/yp/pretending_to_be_wise/ for an explanation -- the post above is a clever take on that. Instead of refusing to pass judgement, it's giving advice that, as the people who did think of it as wise said, "is bullshit if you take it at face value" -- it's meant to serve as a counter-balance to the exact opposites of those, which are obviously also good advice, often given.

By saying a thing, and implying you also believe its opposite, you can never be wrong.

I don't really affiliate myself with the rationalist movement, but I think they have developed a number of useful tools to learn to call people out on trying to bullshit you.

Two notes I did not see below:

* For a site that launched a few days after FireSheep was announced, and that wants me to put in (somewhat) private data, I think that at least having an SSL option is necessary.

* Re: demo page: Is it really that hard to save it tied to a temporary cookie, and copy all the data on the backend to a permanent account if a user signs up? I would not even call that a "demo page": just have the editor widget be right there on the front page, letting the user play with it (keeping the video to the side).

I understand the value of launching quickly, but adding a Gmail auth/Facebook connect option, adding an SSL option and adding better "try-before-I-have-to-give-you-my-email-address" are all things I would consider a must.

[Edit: fixed formatting.]

I would ask for a good mobile web version way before an App (android or iphone). If you have a good mobile web version, people can pretend it's an app, and if it works -- feel free to use PhoneGap to make a real honest-to-god app out of it.

I feel the same dichotomy. What people said below is correct -- he does not mention sexuality -- but it still tinges what he writes.

In thinking why this is, I have the following to offer: if it was "John Q. Random on Why Software Companies Die", there is a good chance it wouldn't rise to the top of HN quite so quickly. The accumulated reputation Card has is actually important for people reading this article. If this is so, then we must remember some of his reputation is being anti-gay-marriage: it is no less important to this article as is him being the author of Ender's Game.

What I was missing is explanations for the badges: what actually got me each badge? Like dannytatom, I would have loved to know what a "Fisher Price First Tweet" is. Especially if you're talking about "winning badges", I would love to know what I need to do to win a badge (are you going to have badges that are "upgrades" from previous badges?)

I would disagree with the central thesis. You can sacrifice P for a weaker version: assume a network which "eventually heals": any live node will answer at least one message in a hundred, say [any node which does not is assumed to be unavailable]. The alternative to P is not "perfect network", it's "bounded from below on the badness thereof network", a significantly more realistic beast.

Thanks! The article was long on CSI-style antics and short on actual science.

While it's not my primary means of communications, my Facebook account gets near 0 spam (both literal spam and "mailing lists which are fairly boring but every now and again I should check") which means that while I made everything else in my smartphone just give a little "pop" sound, Facebook messages (and SMSs) actually make a "pring-pring" (more noticeable) sound -- if my Facebook mailbox has something in it, there's a high likelihood it's a real person, needing something real from me (and there's a high likelihood that I want to give them that, since I actually know them...)

My point: It's actually rational to assume FB messages are more valuable, and given people who do that, it's equally rational to send them messages on FB :)

Cool, I'm very happy that you guys are making money!

(For what it's worth, my love is not abstract -- I actually learned something about my spending habits in the mere two weeks of using Xpenser that helped my peace of mind. It's something that makes my life demonstrably better!)

Let me start by saying I love xpenser. But note the following:

"""

Why is Xpenser free? How do you plan to make money?

We'll be introducing premium accounts that'll carry a monthly fee in the near future. The goal is to keep the base product free and charge for longer data retention and other services. """

It's not yet making money, which would disqualify it from the criteria for this Ask HN